Hanselminutes - Fresh Talk And Tech For Developers

Sometimes the most interesting conversations happen before or after the show. Often they happen with Jeff Atwood. I (Scott) called Jeff to get some audio for our other show http://thisdeveloperslife.com and was recording as soon as Jeff and I started chatting. Here's our unedited random personal phone call that I thought might be fun.

Scott chats with Chris Sells about the pressure to release software as Open Source versus pressure to make money as a business. How are Google, Microsoft and Apple evolving over the years and what should we as developers do about it?

Scott chats with fellow home storage enthusiast Travis Illig about NAS options (Network Attached Storage) available today. Both Scott and Travis purchased (and told their friends about) Windows Home Servers. Where are their Home Servers now, and what are they using going forward?

Glenn Block is with Scott in The Netherlands and tries to get Scott up to speed on what's new in WCF. Scott thinks WCF is scary and heavyweight. How does WCF fit into a world of Web 2.0 lightweight APIs? What's the WCF WebAPI and how does compare to services in ASP.NET MVC?

Scott talks to Chris Sells after Chris has been up since 7am writing JavaScript and HTML. What's the world coming to when one of the world's foremost managed code experts starts writing Web Code? How is he finding JavaScript and what should you do about it?

Scott's at Mix this week and he sits down with Sam Saffron and Rob Conery to talk about their Micro-ORMs. What have they done in less than 400 lines of code, that the rest of the planet needs a dozen assemblies for? Should you abandon your ORM and start writing inline SQL? All this and more.

Mix 11 is today so Scott got the scoop from Phil on the new tools being released.

Scott sits down with Jonathan Carter to brainstorm about optimizing APIs for programmer happiness, rather than programmer productivity.

Scott talks to Martin Woodward, a Microsoft Program Manager who lives and works in Northern Ireland on the Java-based Eclipse plugin for Team Foundation Server. Martin Woodward is the Program Manager for Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere and part of the Team Foundation Server group at Microsoft. He helps to ensure that Eclipse and cross-platform developers are an active part of the TFS eco-system.

This week Scott sits down with the lead dev and lead PM for Entity Framework to talk about the improvements from the first version. What's improved and changed? What do they think about NHiberate or just doing SQL on your own?

Scott chats with Jim Evans from the Selenium team about how to get into Web Automation Testing. What's new in Selenium v2? Can you use Selenium with any browser? How does .NET fit into the process? All this and more in this Web Testing Episode.

Scott talks to Elijah Manor and Dave Ward about how one can take their JavaScript knowledge to the next level. What are the major concepts I should study? Which plugins are the must-haves? What's "Modernizr" and how does it, along with the concept of feature detection make my life easier?

Scott sits down with Rune from AppHarbor. AppHarbor has some strong opinions about how the cloud should work and how applications should be deployed. Is there room for another cloud offering? Is the cloud about elasticity or something else? What's a Cloud and what's Platform as a Service. All this and more as Scott gets educated.

Scott chats with Damian Edwards about new features coming in ASP.NET WebForms, new techniques, controls, model binding, HTML 5 and more.

Scott talks to Javier Lozano and Jon Galloway (and Eric Hexter in spirit) about MVCConf. Thousands of viewers logged in and watched hours of top technical content on ASP.NET MVC this last week. How was it organized? How was it paid for? Can you put together your own free conference?

Scott sits down with Paul Betts and talks about extensing the Reactive Framework. We currently manage our UI events as they are pushed to us. How does programming - and asynchronous programming - change if we change the way UI events are consumed? The ReactiveFramework extends .NET, and Paul's extended that with his Open Source Reactive UI framework. Let's see if Paul can teach Scott a new trick.

Scott chats with Mads Kristensen about HTML5? What exactly is this thing? Is it evolutionary or revolutionary? Should you start working with HTML5 now, or should you wait for some unknown future?

Scott and Drew are shattered, having just finished presenting 8 solid hours of technical but upbeat content in The Netherlands. They're doing WebCamps and take a moment to talk about presenting. How do you start? How do you stay focused and recover from errors? How can you move up from smaller venues to the big rooms? All this, plus Scott's lost his voice.

WebMatrix was relesed on the 13th of January. Some folks have said its very existance is confusing. Do we need another IDE? What's Microsoft trying to pull here? Scott talks to ex-Microsoftie Rob Conery on his unfiltered take.

This week Scott learns about Executable Specifications with Gojko Adzic, Jonas Bandi and Aslak Hellesoy. What's all this talk about BDD, Cucumber, Gerkin and SpecFlow? Where's the best place to start and how to Acceptance Tests fit into my existing projects?